First theme change since July 2007, I guess I was due. I had told Noël that I’d make the switch to his excellent P2 theme once he released the latest version. Since he did that on Friday, it was my turn to fulfill my end of the deal. I installed P2, made a child theme to start tweaking it to my liking with barely any effort and voilà: simple, clean, effective, I love it!
As Arach said it best, even a day later:
Seems to me like most participants of #wcmtl are still on some sort of high. Meeting smart and nice people is better than drugs.
It was indeed too much geeky goodness crammed into one weekend for most attendees, just as much as for yours truly, to wean ourselves off all of it by Monday. 🙂
I’ll have to admit right away that I missed most of the actual sessions, because I kept “being volunteered” for such duties as WordPress Gangsta doorman and sit-down-next-to-me-during-my-talk-in-case-I-have-a-panic-attack’aid (true, ALL of it was fun). But from what I read, people seem to have enjoyed what they’ve seen and to have gotten answers to the questions they might have had.
On the other hand, being so heavily invested in WordPress through Praized Media and other projects/contributions/pipe-dreams, learning wasn’t what I was expecting for myself at the event, but mostly to get to “tribe up” with other people as passionate about the platform as I have now been for years. And, boy, was my wish ever granted!
Apologizing profusely for not being able to list everyone I’ve had the pleasure to meet, I truly had wonderful talks and/or plain old fun with the following people. Most of which is leading to enough ideas to keep us all busy until WordCamp Montreal 2010 (which I hereby predict will be twice as big and happen during the Jazz Fest again. Somehow… 😉
Here we go, in alphabetical order, by Twitter username, no bias:
All in all, I do not think that Sylvain Carle (@afrongnthevalley [en], @sylvaincarle [fr]) and Jeremy Clarke (@jeremyclarke) could have done a better job of organizing this first WordCamp Montreal. I mean, 160+ attendees/speakers from 2 countries for a quasi-free ($30, including free food/drinks) and theoretically local/regional-by-nature tech event spells success to me. Mega-props to these two for making this event happen, and to all of the speakers and attendees for making it the success it has been.
And then of course, there were the Brooklyn Sailors moments. Coz that’s how we roll [out kickass Open Source software]! 🙂
Brendan (left) and I (right) being our usual silly selves. Photo by Eva Blue.
From Jeff Chandler’s “Calais Offers WordPress Plugin Bounty“:
Calais which is a metadata generation web service that is powered by Reuters is offering up a $5,000.00 bounty to anyone who can develop a plugin that meets the following criteria: tag auto suggestion, semantic cloud, GUID incorporation.
I can’t go for this one, having other immediate priorities and commitments, but it sounds like a neat and challenging project to tackle.
From “WordPress MU 1.3.2 | Holy Shmoly!“:
WordPress MU 1.3.2 was tagged earlier today. This is a major security update that brings together the fixes in WordPress 2.3.2 and a number of critical WordPress MU specific security problems.
From the WordPress Blog:
WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.
Stop! Update time! Ta dadada tada tada. Update time!
Done! Painless.
Update: Here’s Peter Westwood’s “WordPress 2.3.2 in detail“, with backlinks to addressed Trac tickets.
I have released a new version (1.2) of wpDirAuth, my LDAP connectivity plugin for WordPress.
The release brings the ability to specify alternate ports for the chosen LDAP server(s), as well as a few bug fixes found through the help of the development and support group members.
The main “Extend” page on WordPress.org states:
One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.
That’s a statement I’ve heard about countless platforms before, but have often been disappointed to find it to be more of a marketing catch-phrase than anything concrete. Not so with WordPress!
I’ve been doing research on how to achieve specific goals with yet another plugin project, and the more I look, the easier it gets. Every time I catch myself thinking “hmm, this one’s gonna be tough”, a quick trip to the WP Codex changes my attitude within just a few minutes. Everything is possible.
Don’t get me wrong, WP is far from the only extensible platform out there and everybody has their personal pet peeves with the code base, but when coupled with amenities such as the wp-hackers mailing list and the wp-plugins dev repo, Matt and Automattic sure made it easy to adopt WordPress as a full featured scaffolding. And that’s coming from a guy who’s usually happy to start his projects from scratch.
Ha! I knew I could almost taste the mythical open, decentralized social network of tomorrow. In context, turns out it was the network of the day-after-tomorrow, with Chris Messina posting today that:
Steve Ivy and I have embarked on a prototype project to build a social network with its skin inside out. We’re calling it DiSo, or “Distributed Social Networking applications”. The emphasis here is on “distributed”.
The initial implementation of the project is built on WordPress, though making clear that this project is intended to be an example whose concepts should be able to be implemented on any platform. Since Steve offers a path to contribute to their effort (see “What’s Next”), I think the floater in my break list might just have found a permanent slot. With a twist and all for the better, so long as I find an area I can effectively contribute to.
I’ve tried to address related subjects on wp-hackers before, but the thread never picked up. The plugin paradigm is always a good approach, and if the implementation solidifies, code could ultimately make it into the WP core. +1 for that on my side! Just visit this very site with the excellent Operator FireFox add-on, and you’ll see what I mean. 🙂
On the other hand, Open Social is now being reported as being delayed until next year:
OpenSocial received a ton of hype when it was announced. Rumors of an early November launch surfaced following Arrington’s announcement of Maki Maki. The announcement turned out to be only that, an announcement. Soon after, I spoke with developers that suggested would open their platform by December 5th. That hasn’t happened either. Techcrunch has pointed to a Google group about OpenSocial in which a Google employee states “This puts us into January before the API is ready to be implemented by containers, so expect some early adopters to have a public launch early 2008.”
With so much activity at the standards/architecture level in the identity and social spheres right now, I’m one to say waiting a few months might actually be a very good thing for all involved parties here. A project of Dilo’s scale will thrive on the experimental angle and be malleable enough to rapidly adapt to changes, but OpenSocial is expected by many to be a stable platform to invest in, and has been presented (or represented) as so.
I’ll be focusing on Plank until the holidays, but I’m already finding myself filling up my wish list for what I want to tackle during the break. Family first, but there’s always a few hours of the day (err, night) to geek it out.
So far, here’s what I have down. Posting it here will give me a push to get it done. 🙂
Bah, with three kids, it’s not like it was going to be a relaxing vacation anyway.
Might as well just add to the fun. 😉
From iPhone Screenshot Goodness at WPhone Admin Plugin:
Thanks to Matt, I can now take iPhone screenshots to my heart’s content. So I’ve updated the set showcased on this site and made a zip archive of 18 screenshots available on the same page.
The only sad thing about this is the “No Service” at the top-left corner of each screenshot… *sigh*
Soon, soon enough.